p o l i c y
r e p o r t
DRUM
MAJOR
INSTITUTE
FOR PUBLIC
POLICY
From Governance to Accountability
Building relationships
that make schools work
By Kavitha Mediratta and Norman Fruchter
New York University Institute for
Education and Social Policy
FOR THE DRUM MA JOR INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY
january
2003
E X E C U T I V E S U M M A RY
“From Governance to Accountability” is offered at a critical juncture for our city’s
public schools. For the third time in the last 50 years—and the second time in a
decade—the New York State legislature has passed a law that significantly alters
the structure of the public school system.
So what now? Our report maintains that the current reform is unlikely to lead to
large-scale school improvement unless it combines top-down structure with
bottom-up relationships with the people most important to student achievement:
parents and communities.
We conclude the following:
•
We need to change the paradigm from governance to accountability.
Governance reforms alone don’t improve schools, despite the preoccupation with them in New York and other cities. Our review of the history
of previous governance reforms illustrates that they failed to build the
capacity of each individual school to improve.
•
Schools improve local action, not through top-down mandates. The
schools that have succeeded against the odds have a shared ingredient:
strong involvement with parents and communities. Why? Because students
whose parents are involved are more likely to succeed, and schools with
parent and community collaborations create cultures of success that
attract additional investment.
•
Until schools have the capacity, the will, and the incentive to create these
relationships, they won’t. And if they do not, our schools will lack a
critical ingredient necessary to transform.
•
Our system continues to suck the oxygen out of relationships with parents
and communities. School staff is given no training or incentive to view
parents and communities as partners. Parent associations and School
Leadership Teams are relied upon as the primary vehicles for involvement,
but are ultimately ineffective because they depend on the will of administrators.
•
Educators work from the assumption that middle-class parents are entitled access to their children’s schools and that their participation in those
schools is legitimate. Low-income parents, historically disregarded by the
professionalized culture of our bureaucracy, are not viewed similarly. In
order to build relationships that overcome layers of suspicion, cynicism
and despair accumulated over decades of a disconnect between schools
and communities, concrete steps will need to be taken to give all parents
more access, representation and power.
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drum major institute for public policy
•
We need a Compstat-like mechanism for measuring the system’s
attempts to create meaningful relationships with parents and
communities. Without such benchmarks, these relationships will
continue to be peripheral. We need to introduce new incentives at
all layers of the system: from teachers, to principals, to the central
office itself. We propose a series of performance standards to help
schools, districts, and the central system evaluate how well they
are engaging their most important partners. Evaluation creates
the expectation that schools, inherently public institutions, must
provide all their stakeholders with access to transparent information, representation in important decision-making, and the assurance that their voice has influence.
Ultimately, we conclude that developing a new community accountability
system that anchors the essential relationships between schools and
communities in ongoing efforts to improve schools is one of the most
critical tasks before us.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This paper was written for the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy by
Kavitha Mediratta and Norm Fruchter of the New York University
Institute for Education and Social Policy. The analysis presented here was
developed with the help of Barbara Gross, Eric Zachary, Edwina Branch,
Richard Gray, Jr., and Mili Bonilla, our colleagues in the Institute’s
Community Involvement Program.
We’ve benefited from the thoughtful feedback provided by the community
organizing groups participating in the New York City Education
Organizers Network. Thanks also to James Mumm of Mothers On the
Move, Lori Bezahler of the Edward W. Hazen Foundation, John Beam of
the National Center for Schools and Communities at Fordham University,
Cathy Albisa of the Center for Economic and Social Rights, and Ellen
Foley of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, for reviewing drafts
of this paper.
We’re grateful to Fernando Ferrer for his initiative in launching the
project that resulted in this paper, and for his overall guidance. We owe
a great debt to the incisive, thoughtful editing and shrewd judgment
of Andrea Batista Schlesinger, whose perseverance and encouragement
kept this paper on track.
About the Institute for Education and Social Policy
The New York University Institute for Education and Social Policy (IESP)
was formed in 1995 to improve public education so that all students, particularly in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, obtain a
just and equitable education, and can participate effectively in a democratic
society. Our research, policy studies, evaluations and strategic assistance
informs policy makers, educators, parents, youth and community groups in
their efforts to improve public schooling. For more information, visit our
website at http://www.nyu.edu/iesp.
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CO N T E N T S
Acknowledgements
Forward by Fernando Ferrer,
President of the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy
5
Introduction
7
PART I:
Governance reform alone won’t improve our schools
9
1. Previous governance reforms have failed to connect
schools and communities.
Community control and decentralization
9
9
The 1996 reform
10
Centralizing power in 2002
11
2. Schools improve through local action,
not top-down mandates.
12
3. The limitations of parent associations
in low performing schools.
13
PART II:
Creating new relationships between our schools
and our communities
15
1. Indicators of community accountability: Transparency
16
2. Indicators of community accountability: Representation
18
3. Indicators of community accountability: Power
21
4. Indicators of community accountability: Oversight
22
PART III:
Implementing community accountability
in New York City’s schools
23
Conclusion
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drum major institute for public policy
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F O R E WO R D
In 1969, I was on the ramparts for decentralization and
Community School Boards. Today, I am pleased to be part of an effort
to envision a time beyond them.
The most important task for New Yorkers today is not to come up with a
new structural arrangement for our schools. Instead, we must accept
responsibility for re-envisioning our schools as public institutions that
serve students, parents and communities.
If we have learned anything from our experiences with the 1969 legislation that brought us decentralization, and the 1996 legislation that created
School Leadership Teams, it is that governance reforms alone don’t
improve public education. Past governance reforms changed structures,
but they didn’t create the deep, sustained relationships between schools
and communities that could actually improve public education.
In the spring of 2002, as the certainty of mayoral control was near, I
became concerned that the city was looking at a next round of governance
reform as the panacea for the system’s failings. The Drum Major Institute
for Public Policy—an institute created during the civil rights movement
whose mission today is to offer progressive competition in the marketplace
of ideas—convened a forum: “Redefining the Governance Debate: From
the Relationship Up.” Three members of our distinguished panel had
created successful public schools. And each of the founders saw the strong
relationships they built with communities as integral to their success.
The data support their experiences. Children with involved parents are
more likely to earn higher grades and test scores, pass their classes, attend
school regularly, possess better social skills, behave better in school,
graduate, and go on to college. The presence of parents and communities
improves the climate of a school. Teachers are more effective when parents
and communities support their efforts. Reforms are more likely to be
sustained when parents and communities are behind them.
So why haven’t schools reached out to parents and communities? It’s not
for a lack of governance reform. It’s because low performing schools lack
the skills, support, and incentive to reach out to parents and communities
as partners. Unless the current round of governance reform helps schools
and districts develop the relationships critical to school improvement, it
will have the same minimal impact as the reforms that preceded it.
The Drum Major Institute reached out to the New York University
Institute for Education and Social Policy to push the public debate from
top-down governance to bottom-up accountability. We quickly realized
that a much larger issue was at stake than what should replace community
school boards. Regardless of structure, our schools and administrators
need to learn to work differently.
We propose that the school system move the issue of parent and community involvement from the periphery to the center. Our paper presents
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a series of indicators to help schools, districts, and the central system
evaluate how well they are engaging their most important partners.
As the system considers its progress in improving student attendance,
test scores, and teacher-student ratios, it must also examine its progress
towards forging meaningful relationships with the community.
We have discussed our proposal with legislators, community organizations, parents and the private sector. It has met with support.
Making schools accountable to communities is an easy concept to give lip
service to. Sure, we’ll let parents sit on a council here, a board there. But
we have seen the reality: unless educators have the will and capacity to
work differently, their relationships to surrounding communities will not
improve, and the ultimate goal of better schools will elude us all.
Fernando Ferrer
President, Drum Major Institute for Public Policy
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INTRODUCTION
New York City public school students returned to class this past
fall in a system whose command structure was streamlined, newly centralized and primed for improvement. The city’s media, political leadership
and policy experts celebrated this new power alignment as a long-awaited
opportunity to transform the city’s schools. Yet the view from below—
from the city’s parents, community residents, neighborhood organizations,
and individual teachers—is of a system so distant and impenetrable that
it has resisted past attempts at improvement and will resist this latest effort
as well. Despite decades of effort to make previous governance reforms
work, school quality varies predictably across the city, there are far too
many poorly performing schools, and those schools are still concentrated
in the city’s high poverty neighborhoods. Meaningful involvement of
parents and community constituencies in those neighborhoods is still
peripheral to the system’s policymakers, despite research demonstrating
that greater involvement helps increase student academic achievement.
If top-down governance could ensure that the city’s schools provide high
quality education to all children, the latest governance reform would generate celebration throughout the city’s poor neighborhoods and communities of color. But no evidence suggests that centralizing power will deliver
the kind of whole-system transformation necessary to improve the city’s
lowest performing schools.1
The perennial struggle over top-down versus local control of our schools
—the policy oscillation between centralization and decentralization—
distracts us from developing relationships based on mutual obligation and
trust between schools, districts and their communities. Instead, current
limited relationships are structured through governance entities—parent
associations, school leadership teams and school boards. These governance
structures have not created the capacity or the incentive among educators
to engage the students, families and communities who could be their
greatest ally in improvement efforts. Instead of focusing on governance,
we must develop bottom-up accountability: new relationships between
schools, districts, and their parent and community constituencies that
foster school accountability for improved academic outcomes.
This paper argues for creating that kind of accountability by developing
mechanisms to improve the school system’s transparency, and by increasing
parent and community access, representation and power in schools
and districts. To make that argument, we first trace the struggles of
parents and communities of color for accountability in our city’s schools.
We analyze why the current governance structures, and the one-way
1
Kirst, Michael W., Mayoral Influence, New Regimes and Public
School Governance. (Consortium for Policy Research in Education,
University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education: May 2002.)
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accountability they attempt to enforce, won’t improve our poorly performing schools. We then examine the implications of bottom-up or community accountability, and offer a set of indicators of new accountability roles
and relationships. As the New York State Legislative Task Force considers
options for what should replace community school boards, we urge it
to create a system of community accountability that re-builds the linkages
among parents, youth, communities and schools.
january 2003 / from governance to accountability
Part I. Governance reform alone won’t improve our schools
The history of who governs the New York City schools is a history
of conflict. The recurring struggle of parents and community advocates
for control of their schools erupted into open conflict in the 1960s.
The frustration that fueled that explosion continues to divide the city’s
communities of color from the largely white bureaucracy and teaching
force. Parents and communities of color have long charged that principals,
school boards, and district and central administrations failed to improve
poorly performing schools because those schools serve other people’s
children. For the past half-century, much of the city’s middle class has
bought out of public education. Current support among civic elites and
the media for the latest effort at centralized governance suggests a renewed
consensus that school decision-making must be insulated from parents
and community forces.
1. Previous governance reforms have failed to connect schools and
communities. Over the last century, control of the New York City
schools has oscillated between local communities and the central office.
The progressive movement of the early 1900’s transformed schools from
community institutions to professional bureaucracies. The progressives’
reforms, centralizing the board of education under a citywide superintendent, and granting teachers civil service status, were intended to end corruption and patronage, and more efficiently educate the city’s growing immigrant populations of Italian, Polish and Russian Jews. Our city’s schools
remained under the control of a citywide superintendent, with an advisory
panel of local representatives, until the 1960’s, when the growing number
of African-American and Latino students created new pressure for reform.
Frustrated by the failure of years of grassroots struggle to force the city
to integrate the public education system, African-American and Latino
communities began to demand the right to run their own schools.
Community control and decentralization
New York City’s decentralized system was created in 1969, after widespread parent and community protests against the Board of Education’s
failure to educate children in the city’s low-income neighborhoods and
communities of color. Community activists won the right to create three
demonstration school districts in which communities would elect representatives to govern their schools and choose their principals. But after these
community districts were established, a decision by one of the new district
administrations to transfer some teachers led to a citywide strike by the
teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers. To end the conflict, a
compromise solution was negotiated and ratified by the New York State
Legislature, which created a decentralized governance structure that divided the city school system into six high school superintendencies and thirtytwo Community School Districts.2 Community School Boards operated
2
The 1968 legislation created 31 Community School Districts.
District 16 was later subdivided into two districts.
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the elementary and middle schools in those thirty-two districts, and
appointed superintendents, principals and assistant principals. Board members were elected to three-year terms. Registered voters living within the
district boundaries, and parents of children attending the district’s schools,
including non-citizen immigrant parents, were eligible to vote in school
board elections.
At the city level, the school system was governed by a seven-member
Board of Education, primarily responsible for appointing the Schools
Chancellor and setting citywide education policy. Each of the city’s five
borough presidents selected one board member; the Mayor selected two.
The Central administration controlled high schools, special education, and
key operational functions such as budgeting, personnel, accounting, building construction, maintenance and leasing, food services, transportation,
security, purchasing and collective bargaining.
The 1969 decentralization law was criticized as soon as it was passed.
Reformers charged that the community school boards encompassed too
large a geographic area, and yoked together too many dissimilar and often
oppositional neighborhoods. Many observers argued that the law deliberately created wasteful conflict between the central administration and the
community school boards because it bifurcated so many essential schooling powers and responsibilities. Others argued that the scope of community school board governance had been severely limited because the central
administration retained control over so many key functions. Parents and
community advocates complained that principals, school boards and the
central administration continued to deny responsibility for improving
failing schools, particularly in the city’s poorest neighborhoods and in
communities of color. Instead of creating new relationships between
schools, parents and their communities, the decentralization redefined governance but failed to reduce the barriers separating school practitioners
from the parents and communities they served.
The 1996 reform
Because three decades of decentralization failed to significantly improve
the quality of education in most of the city’s poor neighborhoods, and
because corruption and educational neglect were endemic in at least a
third of the city’s community school boards, demands for reforming the
city’s school governance structure intensified throughout the 1980’s and
1990’s. In February 1996, Chancellor Rudy Crew took over two Bronx
school boards, citing allegations of corruption. He then escalated his campaign to reduce the power of school boards, primarily by shifting their
hiring and oversight powers to district superintendents. The Mayor and
state legislative leaders called for centralizing governance under the Mayor,
borough boards or an expanded central board, and offered a variety of
proposals for parental participation at the school-level. In response, community-based organizations and parents began organizing for the creation
january 2003 / from governance to accountability
of Chicago-style school councils through which significant parental
decision-making authority would be lodged in local schools.
The New York State Legislature convened a special legislative session in
December 1996 and passed another compromise bill. This new governance
legislation centralized and augmented Chancellor and district superintendent authority over administrative appointments, and expanded school-level
authority over planning for instructional improvement and budgeting.
Community school boards were stripped of much of their power, retaining
responsibility only for overseeing the superintendent selection process,
recommending superintendent candidates, voting on zoning, and convening public meetings. The Chancellor gained the authority to hire and
remove district superintendents, and to take control of poorly performing
schools and districts, on the basis of persistent educational failure. District
superintendents gained sole authority to operate their district’s schools,
the power to appoint and remove principals and hold them accountable
for school performance, as well as the power to allocate district funds and
approve school budgets. The law mandated a role for parents on school
teams (School Leadership Teams or SLTs) established to develop school
improvement plans and school budgets; these teams were required to have
a balance of school staff and parent members.
The legislature’s move was hailed as historic—supporters believed that
curtailing community school boards’ power would remove a longstanding
obstacle to systemic reform. But for many parents and community-based
organizations, the 1996 reform was simply another setback in the continuing struggle to make their schools accountable. Because the reform failed
to increase school and district capacity to engage with communities, many
schools and districts assimilated the reform into their traditional practices.
A 1999 study of parent and community groups’ experience of the new
school governance implementation found “enormous resistance to the new
roles of parents and community-based organizations, a lack of intervention
by Central and superintendents in schools with a history of failure, and
the continued practice of appointing administrators on the basis of relationships rather than performance.”3
Recentralizing in 2002
The 1996 reform was perceived as an insufficient structural change. After
significant lobbying from former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the city’s
private sector and editorial pages and newly elected Mayor Michael
Bloomberg, the New York State Legislature passed yet another school governance reform measure in June 2002 to increase the mayor’s investment
in the city’s schools by consolidating governance authority in the office
of the mayor. This legislation gave the mayor sole responsibility over
Chancellor and superintendent appointments. An advisory education committee, the Panel for Educational Policy, with a majority of its 13 members
3
Mediratta, Kavitha and Ju Wan Choi (1999): School Governance Reform –
Two years later. New York: NYU Institute for Education and Social Policy.
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appointed by the Mayor, replaced the seven-member Board of Education.
Community school boards were to be phased out by June 2003. The law
required the legislative task force to develop a proposal for forms of
parent and community participation to replace community school boards,
although whatever arrangements are ultimately legislated will have no
formal governance role.4
2. Schools improve through local action, not top-down mandates. The
shift of power from locally elected community school boards to the central
office in 1996, and to the mayor’s office in 2002, is part of a national
movement to impose rigorous student achievement standards on all
schools, and particularly on poorly performing schools, and drive improvement through centrally mandated programs. The underlying theory is that
schools will do a better job and students will learn more if a politically
accountable mayor pushes reform down a clearly delineated chain of
command through the bureaucracy to the schools. Thus mayoral control
has replaced elected or appointed school boards in Chicago, Cleveland,
Detroit, Baltimore, Boston and other smaller cities.
But mayoral control is insufficient to change the limited capacity for
effective classroom instruction, school organization, teacher support and
development of poorly performing schools and districts.5 The core functions of teaching and learning must be transformed, school-by-school,
and that transformation requires local investment, control and capacity.
Replacing ineffective leadership with dynamic leadership, developing the
skills of teaching staffs, and transforming dysfunctional school cultures
into learning communities focused on continuous improvement requires
the constant, hands-on involvement of school and district leadership. In
poorly performing schools that have been severed from their communities
through decades of bureaucratic insulation and professional defensiveness,
such transformation also requires the development of bottom-up accountability, which means supporting the creation of new relationships with
parents and community that foster the linkages, transparency and leverage
necessary to make these schools work.
Though the pace of governance reforms has quickened, the latest reforms,
by themselves, will not help schools or districts improve student achievement. Past reforms, as well as the current governance change, have altered
structures, but have not provided the incentive or support for improving
the core relationships of effective schooling—the relationships between
schools, parents, and communities. Neither the past governance reforms,
nor the parent or parent teacher associations upon which much of our
current governance structures rest, have increased school accountability to
parents, students, and communities for improved educational outcomes.
4
The law requires the task force to submit a preliminary report to the governor and
legislature by December 15, 2002, and a final report by February 15, 2003.
5
Elmore, Richard, “Testing Trap,” Harvard Magazine (September- October 2002).
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3. The limitations of parent associations in low performing schools. Parents
are involved in the New York City schools almost exclusively through
school-based parent or parent-teacher associations. But effective parent
participation encompasses far more than joining parent associations.
Effective involvement is generally understood as parent or family participation in school and home-based activities that support student learning.
Parents are expected to take on a variety of roles, from attending school
events and teacher/parent meetings to raising money and serving as parent
association leaders, as well as helping their children at home. Because
students come to school with different levels of preparation and support
for academic success, effective parent involvement bridges the gap between
home and school, inducts parents into the behavioral and academic expectations of the school, and exposes educators to the realities of students’
lives outside the school. Much research indicates that parents who are thus
involved help their children perform better in schools, and help schools
better identify and meet student needs.6
Although parent involvement is critical to effective schools, race, class and
cultural differences affect how well schools encourage that involvement.
Parent-school relationships are shaped by families’ class status, and racial,
ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. Several studies have established that
middle-class parents are more likely to be actively involved in their
children’s education, and their efforts are more likely to lead to student
success, than those of working-class or poor parents. Although all parents
have high aspirations for their children’s education, middle class parents
are more likely than working class or poor parents to anticipate school
expectations, and to possess and deploy those cultural resources that
schools value.7 Annette Lareau and other researchers have demonstrated
that, because of their class status, middle class parents are able to transmit
a kind of cultural capital to their children in the form of attitudes, preferences, behaviors and credentials that facilitate inclusion, successful participation, and upward mobility in schools and other social institutions.8
The ways in which race shapes educators’ low expectations for student
achievement and, therefore, the quality of instruction they provide, have
also been shown to contribute to the distance between families of color
and schools. “Many black [and other minority] families, given the historical legacy of racial discrimination in schools, cannot presume or trust that
their children will be treated fairly in school. Yet, they encounter rules of
the game in which educators define desirable family-school relationships
6
Henderson, Anne and Nancy Berla, (1994), The Family is Critical to Student Achievement: A New
Generation of Evidence. Cambridge and Washington DC: National Committee for Citizens in Education.
7
Lareau, Annette (1987), “Social Class Differences in Family-School Relationships: The importance of
cultural capital.” Sociology of Education, 60. April, 73-85.
8
Lamont, Michele and Annette Lareau (1998), “Cultural capital: Allusions, Gaps and Glissandos in
Recent Theoretical Developments,” Sociological Theory, 6: 153-168. Bourdieu, Pierre (1977), Outline to
a Theory of Practice. London: Cambridge University Press; Bourdieu, Pierre and J.C. Passeron (1977),
Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, Beverly Hills: Sage.
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as based on trust, partnership, cooperation with and deference to white
school officials. These rules are more difficult for black than white parents
to comply with”(Lareau and Horvat).9
In middle class schools in New York City, parents and school practitioners
work within a similar cultural context. In schools serving poor and working class neighborhoods and communities of color, they do not. If educators come with experiences and assumptions based on middle-class (particularly white) social and cultural norms, how should schools respond to the
children of working class and poor families and communities of color who
come to schools with a different set of social and cultural histories, experiences, and assumptions? What happens in schools and districts where no
efforts are made to ground instruction in what children bring to school, or
to bridge home and school cultures? Where, instead, the schools’ overarching assumption is that cultural differences are irrelevant to instruction,
and that all children, whatever their backgrounds, must learn in prescribed
ways? Where parents are considered a hindrance, and incapable of helping
their kids? And where schools have little capacity for effective instruction?
Several prominent school reformers have developed programs to bridge
home and school cultures; James Comer’s School Development Program,
for example, has helped to improve achievement by closing the gap
between parents and schools in New Haven, Connecticut, Prince George’s
County, Maryland and several other urban districts. But our city’s poorly
performing schools—schools with high levels of staff turnover, weak
leadership, and little sense of connection to the community or trust among
adults or between adults and students—have not built frameworks to
bridge the differing assumptions, resources, and expectations that too
often separate home and school cultures. Instead, poorly performing
schools and districts support professional cultures that serve the interests
of adults, not students. These cultures have their own norms and assumptions about the capacities of students’ families and what they can contribute to student success. When the few “good” parents, as the school
defines them, are socialized into these professional cultures, they come to
see reality from the school’s perspective. They tend to be closely allied
with the principal and staff, and to side with the school in placing the
blame for school failure on other, less involved parents. Thus, many poorly
performing schools maintain a tiny parent association, composed of
a few stalwarts, who bemoan the apathy of the rest of the school’s parent
cohort, and blame poor student performance on parental failure to
adequately support their children.
Professional cultures exist in all schools. But there is much less cultural
distance between middle class parents and educators in racially, socio-culturally and linguistically homogenous communities. Educators in these
communities expect parents to engage with them, and parents have experience in handling professional behavior. Parents are not intimidated by
the educators, indeed they are often far more educated. Thus, in affluent
communities, accountability relationships develop organically. White, mid-
9
Lareau, Annette and Erin McNamara Horvat (1999), “Moments of Social Inclusion and Exclusion:
Race, Class and Cultural Capital in Family-School Relationships,” Sociology of Education 72, p 42.
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dle class parents’ relationships with schools start from the assumption that
they are entitled to access to their children’s schools and that their participation in those schools is legitimate. These assumptions shape an implicit
—and sometimes explicit—parent power that insures schools’ receptivity
to parent input, and develops relationships based on the trust that all parties are committed to the maximum academic development of the child. In
contrast, poor parents seeking involvement in their children’s schools often
contend with school defensiveness, hostility and rejection. Too often, poor
parents gain access to their school only by mobilizing a large number of
people, producing sophisticated leaders to forcefully articulate their vision,
and forming strategic alliances with powerful allies.
Parents and communities served by poorly performing schools need the
same power that middle-class communities wield. When parents in poorly
performing schools challenge educators across class and racial lines, without the power that middle-class parents can employ, school practitioners
and district administrators often react by criticizing, dismissing and ridiculing parents and even treating them as threats to school safety. In such
environments, parent associations become instruments for socializing
parents to comply with school norms and for keeping non-conforming
parents out.
In poorly performing schools, educators’ efforts to involve parents and
families must move beyond the parent association to building relationships
based on accountability to families for educating their children successfully. Schools must begin by developing the trust necessary to overcome
the layers of suspicion, cynicism and despair accumulated over the decades
of separating home, community and school.
Part II. Creating new relationships between schools and communities
How can we help schools re-connect to the students, parents and
communities that depend on them to deliver a high quality education?
How can parents and community groups help schools define schooling
problems and strategies for improvement? How can parents and communities hold schools accountable for helping their children succeed? We
propose the notion of community accountability as a way to conceptualize,
understand and measure the existence of the critical relationships between
schools, parents and communities. The new community accountability
we seek has four key dimensions: transparency, representation, power,
and oversight. What follows is a framework for that new community
accountability, accompanied by a set of indicators to assess the extent of
school, district and system-wide implementation.
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1. Indicators of community accountability: Transparency
Transparency is our term for the school system’s ability to produce information about student and school educational outcomes. We include data
that identifies student academic performance, as well as critical schoollevel inputs (for example, data on teacher and administrator experience,
school expenditures and building conditions). Transparency helps parents
and community constituencies understand what resources schools have
and how well or how poorly schools are educating their children.
Such transparency involves more than making data available, as the
school system currently does on the Web and through its Annual School
Reports; such web-based reporting needs to complement face-to-face
efforts. Individual parents need opportunities for detailed discussion with
teachers to jointly examine their own child’s work, analyze progress or
lack of progress, and consider strategies for learning improvement.
Parent-teacher conferences as currently structured do not provide sufficient time, privacy, preparation or focus to meet these requirements. Only
deep structural changes in school organization, scheduling, professional
development and staff support can produce the pre-conditions for the
extensive and intensive parent-teacher dialogues about improving student
achievement necessary to involve parents as partners in students’ learning.
Improving school-level academic performance requires similar communication, dialogue about effectiveness, and discussion of strategies. Now
that the New York State and City Departments of Education are producing much more data about school-level outcomes, transparency requires
effective communication of those data, through electronic and paper
reports in easy-to-understand formats frequently disseminated to parents
and community constituencies. Effective communication of data needs to
be accompanied by school-level dialogues that bring together administrators, teachers, parents, neighborhood organizations and community constituencies. Through such dialogues, principals should make semi-annual
reports on the State of the School, share data defining school performance
and instructional practice, identify school strengths and shortcomings,
and discuss strategies for improvement.
An example of such school-level dialogues is the type of accountability
forum developed by the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC).
BASRC’s forums bring together school and parent constituencies to review
data about school outcomes, to examine teacher instructional practices,
and to discuss school-level improvement strategies. These reviews of
school performance are designed to establish a tradition of open discussion
of school strengths, limitations and how the school will move towards
improvement, among practitioners, parents and community constituencies.
Community organizing groups in the Industrial Areas Foundation network
in Texas have helped school administrators convene and host similar
sessions in schools participating in the Alliance Schools network.10
10
Shirley, Dennis, Community Organizing for Urban School Reform
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997).
january 2003 / from governance to accountability
Transparency also requires district-level dialogues about performance and
improvement. Superintendents should make semi-annual presentations
about the State of the District, propose improvement strategies, and discuss their presentations with parents and community constituents in an
open forum. Many suburban and rural school boards have developed
effective community-wide dialogues focused on data-rich examinations of
district performance and discussions of strategies for improvement.
Several local public education foundations, in Grand Rapids, Michigan
and Wake County, North Carolina, among others, have developed public
forums that bring school practitioners, parents, and community constituencies together for extended dialogues analyzing district performance
and developing strategies for improvement.
We believe that every New York City school and district needs to adopt
transparency mechanisms that help educators forge effective links
between parents, communities and their schools. Efforts to achieve such
transparency could be measured through a series of indicators, tracked
over time, and serve as the basis for an annual report by the Mayor
to parents, students and community constituencies.
Indicators of increased transparency in the school system:
• Useful information about school resources and school and student
performance is disseminated widely.
• Frequent discussions take place between parents and educators
about student performance and how it can be improved.
• Public dialogues about how to improve school and district
performance occur at both the school and district level.
• Annual state of the school, district and system reports are delivered
by principals, superintendents and the Mayor.
• All discussions are conducted in linguistically and culturally
appropriate ways.
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2. Indicators of community accountability: Representation
Parents Associations (PAs) provide formal means of representation for
parents, with parents annually electing a slate of PA officers. Because
poorly performing schools usually harbor barely existing, under-resourced
and often collusive PAs or PTAs, they are incapable of tackling their
school’s problems. In these schools, the educational interests of the
school’s parent population are rarely represented effectively. One way to
approach this problem is to develop new and broader forms of representation. Suppose parents in all poorly performing schools could elect a
different form of PA or PTA representation? Why not allow community
organizations to petition for representation, much as unions petition
to represent a plant’s workers through a National Labor Relations Boardmediated election?
More than a dozen independent, community-based organizations are
organizing for education reform in poor neighborhoods across the city.
These organizations work for the collective advancement of the neighborhood’s children analogously to the way middle class parents work for
the advancement of their own children. They challenge, for example,
inadequate school facilities, ineffective school leadership, the over-referral
of African-American students to special education, the concentration
of inexperienced teachers in the city’s lowest performing schools, and low
high school graduation rates.
Yet, because schools are often so isolated from their communities, staff
and administrators have little knowledge of these organizations. The
current governance structure gives schools no incentives to engage them in
working relationships. If the community group is not represented on
school leadership team (SLT) or parent association, the principal can (and
often does) easily dismiss its participation as illegitimate, deny it access to
information about the school, refuse to engage in dialogue or debate about
improvement, or tell it to bring its concerns to the parent association.
Why not allow parents to vote on whether a new parents’ organization
should be developed and staffed by a community-based organization
working with families served by the school? A community group might
do a more effective job of holding the school accountable than the PA or
PTA. If it failed, it could be voted out at the next election.
We raise this example as one way to improve accountability in poorly
performing schools. Perhaps few community groups would welcome the
responsibility to develop the school support roles that many PAs routinely
play. Perhaps specific functions of review and discussion of school performance, rather than PA representation and management, could be
configured for community groups with a stake in helping schools improve
their performance. What we are suggesting is that parent and community
january 2003 / from governance to accountability
representation should transcend the PA and PTA and involve the broader
community in reviewing school performance and helping schools
improve. In every neighborhood, a far wider range of stakeholders has an
interest in helping schools do better than we currently engage.
If the community school boards are abolished, there will be neither a formal role for parent participation beyond the school level, nor a formal
venue for public discussion and debate of district-wide educational issues.
A reflexive way to solve this problem is to create parent councils at the
district level, composed of representatives elected from PAs/PTAs or
School Leadership Teams. Indeed, such structures have already been proposed, though how they might contribute to improving the relationships
between schools and community constituencies, or helping schools
improve their performance, is unclear. From our perspective, effective
structures to improve student and school performance must include representation broader than PAs, PTAs and SLTs; community groups and other
stakeholders also need to be represented to develop the new relationships
that community accountability requires.
How can these new relationships based on broader representation be
developed? Across the country, several districts have developed collaborations among elected officials, service providers, community organizations
and school systems to improve student and school outcomes. The successes
of collaboratives in El Paso, San Francisco, Sacramento, CharlotteMecklenburg and other urban districts suggest new mechanisms for
expanded representation that can hold schools and districts accountable
to community constituencies for their students’ performance.
Indicators of expanded representation in schooling dialogues:
• School discussions include a wide range of parent and community
constituencies, including independent parent groups and
community organizations.
• School and district leaders value the perspectives of these diverse
stakeholders and solicit their input in discussions about school
and district performance.
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Beyond the PA: Organizing for school improvement
New Settlement Apartments (NSA)
began organizing parents in 1997 in
response to widespread concern
about the quality of neighborhood
schools among public school parents living in the NSA housing development in the South Bronx. Parents
formed the NSA Parent Action
Committee (PAC), which began by
looking at the Annual School Report
of a nearby elementary school. They
found that less than a fifth of the
students could read at grade level.
Yet the school was removed from
the New York State’s list of low performing schools (SURR).
. . .
Parents invited a district representative to address their concerns about
their children’s low reading scores.
But when the district representative
ignored their questions and dismissed their data presentation, parents decided to launch a campaign
to improve the school. They gathered petition signatures from parents, met with local institutions and
churches to enlist their support,
held meetings with Board of
Education officials, and staged
demonstrations and press conferences to call for school improvement. These efforts ultimately led to
the resignation of the school’s principal who both parents and teachers
believed was ineffective.
11
. . .
Local school and district officials
repeatedly used the parent association as an excuse to turn away the
NSA parents for not being “the official parent organization.” Parent
association members felt loyal to
the school’s principal and were hostile to NSA parents. A national study
of school reform organizing by the
NYU Institute for Education and
Social Policy found that parent leaders in most community organizations are refused essential school
documents like the school’s
improvement plan and annual performance review, and berated by
school administrators for not participating in the parent association. 11
Ironically, the parent association, the
entity created to strengthen parent
involvement in low performing
schools, has become a means by
which the school system deflects
parent-led school improvement
efforts.
. . .
Suppose the parent activism conducted by PAC were the norm in
urban schools serving poor neighborhoods and communities of color.
What if parents could choose such
an organization to represent them
in holding school and district officials accountable? As unique public
institutions charged with the
Kavitha Mediratta, Norm Fruchter and Anne Lewis, Organizing for School
reform: How Communities Are Finding their Voice and Reclaiming their Public
Schools, (New York: NYU Institute for Education & Social Policy, 2002).
responsibility of educating children
who will shape the city and the
country’s future, public schools
should provide parents of those children with the right to choose the
organizations that represent them.
. . .
One way to do this is through a
clearly defined public process, perhaps articulated and monitored by
the New York State Department of
Education. Through that process,
parents in failing schools could
choose to be represented by a traditional parent association, or one
organized by one of the neighborhood’s community groups working
with families served by the school.
Once selected, the group would
serve as the legitimate representative of the school’s parents, with the
authority to negotiate on their
behalf. School and district staff and
administrators would be required to
recognize, legitimate and meet with
the community group, to make
available data about school performance, and to discuss priorities
and plans for school improvement.
The prior PA or PTA would be disbanded until the next electoral
cycle, when it could compete with
the community group to represent
parent interests.
. . .
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3. Indicators of community accountability: Power
The new structures to achieve transparency and representation we suggest
above are based on dialogue and discussion about student and school
performance. But dialogues and discussion alone won’t guarantee that
parents and communities can work in new ways with schools to improve
student performance. Suppose district and school administrators attempt
to dominate these new forms of dialogue, by exercising their traditional
modes of professional expertise. Suppose, as a result, they recreate traditional forms of intimidation and exclusion. Or suppose district and
school administrators ignore their responsibility to participate in those
dialogues, and dismiss the opportunities to create these new relationships.
What can help parents and community groups ensure that schools and
districts help develop these new relationships?
One possibility is to mandate the development of the new accountability
mechanisms suggested above, and to make principals and superintendents
responsible for their implementation. Failures to implement them could be
appealed, through existing avenues, to the Chancellor, or to the oversight
mechanisms we suggest below. Another possibility is to involve the School
Leadership Team (SLT) in school-based accountability, as well as in
instructional planning and budgeting. There are various suggestions currently in play for strengthening the SLT; many of them focus on giving the
SLT the power to hire and fire the principal, as Chicago’s Local School
Councils do. Because the SLT is the major governance entity at the school
level, elects half its members from the school’s parent body, and can add
community group representation, we think that the SLT should be given
the accountability power to conduct the principal’s annual evaluation.
This evaluation should be implemented in an open forum, perhaps following the accountability dialogue based on the principal’s State of the School
report that we outlined above.
Our design for community accountability calls for dialogues about student performance and school instructional practice at both school and
district levels. Just as the principal would be required to initiate the
school-level dialogue with a State of the School report, so the district
superintendent would be required to open the district-level dialogue with
a State of the District report. Just as we recommend that the SLT lead a
public process of evaluating the principal, we recommend that the
superintendent’s performance be publicly evaluated at the district-level.
Whatever form of district-level governance is ultimately legislated, we
recommend that the new governance structure convene an annual districtwide forum to discuss the superintendent’s State of the District report
and to conduct the superintendent’s evaluation. The findings of that evaluation should be reported to the Chancellor with recommendations for
continuance or termination.
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Indicators of increased parent and community power:
• Teacher performance evaluations and appointments consider
efforts to engage parents in frequent, regular discussions about
student performance.
• School and district administrator appointments involve significant
input from diverse parent and community constituencies.
• School accountability forums are convened to review the state
of the school and the principal’s performance, and make
recommendations for reappointment.
• District-wide accountability forums that are open to the
public are convened to review the state of the district and the
superintendent’s performance and make recommendations
for appointment.
4. Indicators of community accountability: Oversight
Whatever new forms of transparency, representation and power are
developed, we see a need for oversight to ensure that the new structures
are implemented effectively. An external and independent oversight mechanism, external to districts and schools and independent of the school
system and the mayor, is necessary to maintain community accountability
in the school system’s top-down governance system. Such an external,
independent oversight mechanism would provide a forum for investigation, venues for redress of grievance, and the power to enforce change,
particularly in poorly performing schools and districts that continue to
resist parent and community accountability.
An oversight function could be structured on models of ombuds oversight
for public services in western European countries, particularly in
Scandinavia and the Netherlands. An ombuds structure could be given
sufficient authority and funding so that oversight, investigation and powers to mandate solutions can be carried out, across the city school system.
At a minimum, such an Ombuds Office could be charged to oversee the
implementation of whatever new accountability structures were created.
Indicators of effective oversight:
• An independent and external authority investigates
and intervenes when school performance is
consistently poor, and district and school leaders fail
to engage parents and the community.
• This office is widely publicized, well known and easy
to access.
january 2003 / from governance to accountability
Part III. Implementing community accountability in
New York City’s schools
How can we move towards greater accountability to the communities schools serve, when creating such accountability requires a seismic
cultural shift in our schools? If, particularly in low-performing schools,
there is very limited capacity to work with parent and community constituencies, mandating parent and community accountability without
providing intensive support, guidance, and encouragement will mire these
schools and districts in even more failure. But without clear directives
from the school system’s leadership, schools lack the incentive to explore
new parent and community relationships. How can these two conflicting
realities be addressed?
A differentiated, flexible and staged process could begin to implement a
new system of community accountability in our city schools. First, the
Department of Education needs to design an incentive system that gives
schools and districts the motivation to move towards developing community accountability. Second, the Department must create a series of indicators to measure progress towards achieving school system accountability
to communities. Third, it must concentrate resources on helping principals and teachers in the lowest performing schools and districts learn how
to implement new strategies for community accountability—particularly
for transparency, representation and power. And finally, the Department
must grant more autonomy to schools when they demonstrate success.
Action steps for implementing community accountability:
1) Design an incentive system to motivate schools and districts to
move towards community accountability.
2) Adopt indicators (such as those proposed in this paper) to measure
progress towards achieving school system accountability to
communities.
3) Concentrate resources on helping principals and teachers in the
lowest performing schools to implement new strategies
for community accountability—particularly for transparency,
representation and power.
4) Grant increasing autonomy to schools when they demonstrate
success.
Training to effectively implement transparency, representation and power
can help school and district practitioners redefine their roles and relationships with their communities. New methods for effectively engaging
and working with diverse constituencies can be integrated into principal
preparation and teacher professional development. Useful models for
engagement are emerging from community organizing groups around the
country, particularly in California and Texas, where educators participate
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in neighborhood walks and home visits to break down the barriers
caused by fear, ignorance and stereotypes that prevent the necessary trust,
dialogue and joint action from developing.12
Moreover, because effective parent and community engagement depends
on a new infrastructure of support, new funding streams are essential.
Whatever entity—the traditional PA or PTA or a newly elected representational community group—becomes responsible for engaging parents will
need sufficient resources to hire staff, secure a meeting space and finance
effective outreach, through mailings, phone-banking or other means, to
carry out its mission successfully.
Indicators of effective implementation of
community accountability:
• Institutional barriers (such as fees for space, policies that restrict
CBO access to schools) are removed to help schools and local
community institutions to develop effective partnerships.
• Training is provided to district and school leaders on facilitating
meaningful relationships with parent and community
constituencies.
• A separate funding stream is created to support parent and community engagement at the school and district level.
• City workers with children in the public schools are given time off
without penalty to attend school events; similar policies are
adopted by private sector companies with significant percentages
of employees who are parents of public school children.
CO N C L U S I O N
As the New York State legislature considers what should replace community school boards, our city faces key choices about how the future of
our school system’s governance is structured. We can choose to narrow the
debate by focusing only on the merits of a variety of governance alternatives. But if we limit ourselves to considering only new governance
arrangements, we risk re-creating the same narrow, formulaic rituals that
defeated public participation in the community school board system.
Instead, we can engage the urgent task of re-imagining accountability in
our schools, and creating the framework for building new relationships
among parents, community groups and constituencies, and school practitioners. We believe that developing a new community accountability
system that anchors those essential relationships in ongoing efforts to
improve schools is the critical task that faces us.
12
Shirley, Dennis (1997). Furger, Roberta, Making Connections Between Home
and School, (2002: The George Lucas Educational Foundation).